Applied Digital’s $3.6B AI Campus Breaks Ground in Rapides Parish

Six months after site work began quietly near the I-49 interchange south of Boyce, Governor Jeff Landry made Applied Digital Corporation’s $3.6 billion AI data center campus in Rapides Parish official on Tuesday. The project, called Delta Forge 1, will occupy approximately 300 acres within the England Airpark Authority’s jurisdiction, drawing a combined 300 megawatts of critical IT load across two purpose-built facilities designed for large-scale AI training and inference workloads.

The project marks the company’s first Louisiana location and the first major AI campus to land in Central Louisiana, arriving as Louisiana has become one of the most concentrated targets for data center investment in the country, with Meta, Amazon Web Services, and Hut 8 each financing or building campuses across four other parishes.

A 672-Acre Parcel, Two Buildings, Mid-2027

The Dallas-based company (Nasdaq: APLD), founded in 2021, purchased a 672-acre parcel near Boyce in December 2024. Rapides Parish’s economic development district formally designated the full lot as England District Subdistrict No. 4 in February 2026, establishing the local tax structure the project will operate under. Roughly 300 of those acres form the active campus area; the remaining 372 will stay undeveloped, listed by the company as available for uses not yet announced.

Site preparation started in January 2026. The campus runs on a 15-year initial lease with three five-year renewal options, giving the project a framework of 27 years in total. Initial operations are scheduled for mid-2027, according to Louisiana Economic Development’s official Delta Forge 1 announcement.

An AI training and inference workload is among the most power-dense computing uses a data center can host, typically requiring ten to twenty times the power density of conventional enterprise computing. At 300 megawatts of critical IT load, the campus would draw electricity at a scale comparable to a small city, and that figure drives every aspect of site selection, from proximity to regional transmission infrastructure along the I-49 corridor to the closed-loop cooling design the company deploys across its campuses, which eliminates the continuous water draw that most comparably sized facilities require.

The State That Became a Data Center Destination

Delta Forge 1 joins three other confirmed AI infrastructure commitments that have concentrated more than $50 billion in planned data center capital across five Louisiana parishes in under 18 months.

Act 730, enacted in Louisiana’s 2024 regular legislative session, created a state and local sales tax exemption covering qualifying purchases or leases of data center equipment. The statute defines eligible equipment as hardware or software used for “processing, storage, retrieval, or communication of data,” including servers and routers. Applied Digital confirmed its campus qualifies, and the program also covers the other three major projects committed to the state. Full eligibility criteria are outlined on Louisiana Economic Development’s data center incentives page.

The exemption carries no cap on eligible spend. For a campus where a substantial portion of total investment flows into servers, storage systems, and networking hardware, the tax relief scales proportionally with project size, which is precisely why Act 730 has functioned as an effective draw for commitments of this magnitude.

Chris Masingill, president and chief executive of Louisiana Central, the economic development connector for the ten parishes of Central Louisiana, called the project “one of the most transformational in the history of Rapides Parish, surpassing even the major industrial investments of the 1950s and 60s.” He added that it “positions Central Louisiana to compete for major economic opportunities in ways we haven’t seen in generations.” For a region that has not attracted capital formation at this scale in decades, placement alongside Meta’s Richland complex and Amazon’s Shreveport-area campuses is a qualitative shift in economic geography that no prior announcement cycle produced.

Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan B. Bourgeois captured the state’s positioning at the event: “With stronger alignment, greater speed and a clear focus, we are seeing unprecedented momentum and growth reach every region of our state.”

Applied Digital’s Built Record

Applied Digital is not a promotional announcement vehicle. The company operates AI factory campuses in North Dakota under signed contracts with CoreWeave, the AI hyperscaler backed by Nvidia, and has delivered phase milestones on schedule across active construction sites, a track record that distinguishes a credible $3.6 billion groundbreaking from a speculative one.

• Polaris Forge 1, Ellendale, North Dakota: A 400-megawatt campus contracted entirely to CoreWeave under leases projected to generate approximately $11 billion in total revenue over their 15-year terms, including $7 billion from the two initial agreements executed in May 2025. Phase I delivered in October 2025; Phase II completed on schedule in November 2025.
• Polaris Forge 2, Harwood, North Dakota: A separate AI factory campus with investments projected to exceed $3 billion, backed by a $5 billion perpetual preferred equity facility from Macquarie Asset Management covering multiple company campuses.
• Named Best Data Center in the Americas for 2025 by Datacloud, an independent industry recognition program.
• A $300 million senior secured bridge facility announced earlier this year for continued development at Polaris Forge 1, demonstrating continued capital market access through active construction cycles.

The Nvidia connection predates the Louisiana groundbreaking by roughly three years. Officials at the Boyce announcement noted that the path to building this campus began when Nvidia made an early investment in the company, providing pre-boom validation of its power-dense AI factory design before that model became the industry default. The company structures its business around long-duration infrastructure leases, converting large external financing, including the Macquarie preferred equity facility, into predictable multi-decade revenue streams closer to an infrastructure company’s cashflow profile than a technology cyclical’s. The pattern established at Polaris Forge 1 and Polaris Forge 2 is what gives the Rapides Parish commitment its practical credibility.

Cleco, 300 Megawatts, and the Rate Question

Cleco Power will supply all electricity to the campus. Bill Fontenot, president and chief executive of Cleco, described the contract in terms that left no ambiguity about how the utility views the project’s scale.

This is the largest economic development opportunity in Cleco’s 90-plus year history and reflects the region’s growing competitive position for major infrastructure and technology investments.

The standard concern around data center announcements of this size is that residential ratepayers end up absorbing the cost of new transmission and generation infrastructure built to serve a single industrial-scale customer. Fontenot pushed back on that directly, saying the project structure prevents cost-shifting and that the company has agreed to fully reimburse all infrastructure expenses associated with delivering power to the campus. Spreading a large fixed-cost utility system across a broader customer base, Fontenot argued, reduces per-customer costs rather than concentrating them. Cleco confirmed in a separate statement that it has received assurances preventing the shifting of costs onto existing customers.

Applied Digital Director Richard Nottenburg pointed to the company’s existing North Dakota operations, where he said residential electricity rates in surrounding communities declined after that campus came online. Louisiana’s grid context amplifies the stakes of those assurances; the state ranks third among all states in per-capita electricity consumption, meaning the grid already carries one of the country’s heaviest residential loads before any new industrial demand arrives. On water, Nottenburg said the closed-loop cooling design applied across the company’s campuses eliminates continuous water draw, with each building consuming roughly as much water as a single-family home.

The Economic Deal: Jobs, Taxes, and a 27-Year Clock

Louisiana Economic Development and the company released detailed figures covering construction employment, permanent hiring, annual payroll, and payments to local government across the full term of the agreement.

• 200 direct full-time on-site jobs at approximately $90,000 annually, representing salaries at 150% of Louisiana’s average state wage
• More than 1,000 construction jobs expected at peak development activity
• 218 additional indirect jobs estimated by Louisiana Economic Development, for a combined regional impact of 418 new positions
• $32.67 million in combined annual payroll from campus operations, per the company’s published figures
• $575.5 million pledged to ten Rapides Parish taxing bodies over the 27-year agreement
• $3.3 million per year to the parish Sheriff’s Office, totaling $88.1 million over the full term

Ralph Hennessey, executive director of the England Economic and Industrial Development District, called the investment “a defining moment” for the region. The long-term payment schedule to local taxing bodies is more durable than the construction-phase employment figure that typically dominates announcement-day coverage; it commits revenue to parish governments for nearly three decades, outlasting multiple election cycles and budget seasons.

What Tuesday’s official materials do not include is a publicly named tenant for the campus. No lease disclosure accompanied the groundbreaking announcement, though the company has a documented pattern of signing customer agreements concurrent with or shortly before public construction milestones. At Polaris Forge 1, the CoreWeave agreements were executed in May 2025, months before the first building reached service readiness. Who signs the campus lease, and at what contracted revenue total, is the figure that ultimately converts a long-term economic projection into a schedule of actual payments for Rapides Parish governments.

Site preparation is underway, the Cleco power contract is confirmed, and initial operations are set for mid-2027. By then, Louisiana will have multiple major AI campuses approaching operational status simultaneously, and the state’s grid operators will face their first real test of whether aggregate industrial demand from five parishes can be absorbed without the rate increases that state officials have pledged, repeatedly, will not come.